In his foreword to the autobiography of animator William Hanna, who has died aged 90, his lifelong partner Joe Barbera wrote: "William Shakespeare once asked, 'What's in a name?' For Bill Hanna and myself, the name of Hanna-Barbera inaugurated a lifelong creative alliance that I will always cherish."

Hanna, so equal a half in the partnership of Hanna-Barbera Productions that they were occasionally wont to run their surnames in reverse, sat on one side of a large desk, with Barbera on the other. The setting was a battered building on the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lot, where they wrote, directed and produced more than 200 Tom and Jerry cartoon shorts, and won seven Oscars and even more Emmys.

They also created Huckleberry Hound, the Flintstones and a myriad of other mouth-moving, head-nodding characters. Hanna's understanding of comic tempo, and his ability to marshal top artistic talents into an efficient working unit, were perfect complements for Barbera's draughtsmanship, strong story sense and comic inventiveness.

Hanna was born in Melrose, New Mexico, the only boy in a family of seven children. His father, William, was a sewage construction superintendent, and the family moved to Oregon, where he was involved in building the Balm Creek dam. In 1929, young Bill went to Compaton junior college to study journalism. Meanwhile, he had joined the Boy Scouts of America, an enthusiasm that never left him; in later years, he became a scoutmaster and, in 1991, won a special award from the Scouts' Great Western Council.

After losing his job during the depression, Hanna's father went to Hollywood to help build the Pantages theatre, and he was able to give his son his first job. Then the fiancé of one of his sisters told him about Leon Schlesinger, an independent producer who ran Pacific Art and Title. Schlesinger's distributor had offered him the chance to open an animation studio making short cartoons with music tracks. Hanna, whose hobby was music, rushed to see the producer and met the two men who would run the department.

Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising, two of Walt Disney's best men, showed him their first effort, a Loony Tune entitled Sinking In The Bath-Tub, starring their first hero, Bosko the Black Boy. Hanna promptly joined the staff as storyman and in-betweener - filling in the cel transparencies between the animators' poses - as well as advising and devising, a timing system for synchronising the music and sound effects.

His first director's credit appeared in 1934 on a silly-symphony style short called To Spring. Three years later, Warner sacked Harman and Ising, but, within a year, they were cosily installed with Hanna as the new cartoon production department of MGM. Then Hanna met Barbera.

The first MGM cartoons were no great success, despite the fact that they were animated versions of such newspaper comic-strip heroes as the Captain and the Kids. Economy may have been a factor, as the studio released them in sepiatone instead of full Technicolor, via Disney, the standard for virtually all cartoon films. What A Lion and Blue Monday were two of the series the new friends worked on. Then came their first original epic, Puss Gets The Boot, starring a cat and a mouse.

Although the heroes were unnamed, they were clearly the model for Tom and Jerry. The names came when the studio, egged on by exhibitors' letters pressing for more cat-and-mouse fun, held an internal competition, won by an animator named John Carr. Another reason for making more was a totally unexpected nomination for that year's Academy award.

The new partnership in well-produced animated hilarity was soon ranked second only to Walt Disney in its field. Disney, then concentrating on feature-length films, was less a competitor than he might have been, especially when MGM, realising the international popularity of Tom and Jerry, began to insert them into starry musicals. First came Anchors Aweigh (1945), when Gene Kelly danced with Jerry. Then came the title sequence for Holiday In Mexico (1946), followed by a brilliant underwater escapade with Esther Williams for Dangerous When Wet (1953), and, again with Kelly, Invitation To The Dance (1954).

In 1943, Yankee Doodle Mouse, a war-time adventure for Tom and Jerry, won Hanna and Barbera their first Academy award. Six more would follow, but in the wake of success came shock; in 1956, after executive producer Fred Quimby retired, MGM shut down its animation studio.

Hanna and Barbera promptly made a bid for the burgeoning television market. There was one major snag: the cost. Their Tom and Jerry films came out at $35,000 apiece for each seven-minute film. For one five-minute film, the TV distributor, Screen Gems, offered $2,700 - so Hanna devised a system of limited animation, with two new characters, a pair of dogs called Ruff and Reddy.

Unlike Tom and Jerry, the dogs talked, which meant easy animation involving moving mouths and nodding heads. Voiced by radio comedians Daws Butler and Don Messick, the first Ruff and Reddy cartoon, Planet Pirates, was premiered by NBC on December 14 1957. Designed to make fun of popular science-fiction films, it was an immediate success, and NBC signed the new company, Hanna-Barbera Productions, for five years.

For both men, this was the start of an incredible new career, but it also heralded the downfall of animation as an art. True, in time, colour would come along, and longer shows would be made - at 25 minutes - then seasonal specials to fill an hour, and feature-film animations for cinemas. True, animation would become a worldwide industry with cartoonists feeding their sequences to the Hollywood headquarters for assembly.

True, Taft Communications bought the company in 1966 for $26m, and true that, in 1977, CBS televised a special called The Happy World of Hanna-Barbera. But it is also true that the contrasting clips from their MGM days show up the boring awfulness of their more recent productions.

Hanna leaves his wife Violet, whom he married in 1936, a daughter and a son.

William Denby Hanna, animator, born July 14 1910; died March 22 2001

This obituary has been revised since the death of the author last year